I would say that the industry is already trending towards more of a third-party reseller model with companies like Arlula, UP42, Astraea, and numerous others. While we do see the benefits of being able to offer multiple sources of satellite data (virtual constellations combining high-res, low-res, SAR, hyperspectral, etc.) we want to limit our attention to doing one thing extremely well: providing high-res visible imagery.
To your point of developing our own tech-stack for "table stakes" - we certainly hope so. Planet has done a lot of fantastic work here as far as developing robust imagery pipelines but stopped short of removing salespeople from the process. We're hoping to take their approach a step further and remove that manual (human) component from both the sales process and delivery pipelines.
Hope that helps!
Since much of the tech stack you describe seems to be offered by Planet, (and having experienced the delays and sticker-shock associated with the salesperson-driven enterprise sales process with such companies firsthand), might the industry evolve in such a way that Albedo act as a priceline.com / overstock 'off-brand' reseller of Planet's existing data pipelines? Does developing your own tech-stack basically give you 'table stakes' i.e. signaling a viable alternative to sales channel conversations with existing satellite imagery providers?